After several minutes of quiet, Nan turned to me. “So what now, my love?
I shrugged, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. “I can’t turn everyone into gummy bears, can I?”
Jez shook her head. “Haven’t you seen Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs? Rat seagulls and anthropomorphic feral food. Not nice.”
“So what do I do with these fucks?”
“I’ve got guns in my room. A firing squad is an old skool way of sorting them out,” Flea said.
“But then others will just jump in their vacated positions,” I said. “Things need to bloody change here and I don’t know how.”
You think of outcomes, Greynell said, that is not yours to control. Unless you wish to become Aravisian too?
I shook my head. “I’m sure you’ve got the makings of a great country here, but right now, I’m desperate to go home.” Flea grabbed my hand and squeezed my fingers. “I could destroy the bonds between dragons and riders?”
And you would leave some dragons bereft. Not all are treated badly, Greynell said.
“Overthrow the government?”
As you said, another will be built on the same principles.
“So what then?”
The answer is in what you did for the Queen, Greynell said. When people aspire to change, they use the experiences, the testimony of those who had suffered. They do this both to give the victims a platform to share their pain, but more importantly, because it is in stories, communal experiences, not facts and figures, that make the difference. When a story resonates, a pain is shared and we decide to work very hard to try and ‘fix’ what we perceive the root to be. What is needed is for Aravisia to see, to feel what has happened to dragon and humankind alike. To feel the trauma as if their own, to perceive the consequences as if their own. That is what will create the change.
With Greynell’s nod I could see the path forward. It wouldn’t be a bloodless one, no revolution is. There would be upheaval and chaos, blood, death and not just of the guilty. I swallowed, aware of the enormity of what I was going to do and then pushed the wish out into the world, to be made a reality.
Into the consciousness of every dragon, every person old enough to cope with the information, the experience of the dragon queen is shared. Not the observation, cool and clinical, of the chemical rape of both my dragon and the Queen’s, but what was felt, what was sensed, the powerlessness and agony, the breaking of something inside a person that perpetrated abuse creates, to live long past the actual event. I linked the experience of Greynell and her slain children, the experiences of the queens fighting for dominance, the death of Lirriluth. Go deeper, Greynell said. I looked at her and she stared back. All of it. All dragons’ experiences.
You’re going to have chaos on your hands, I said to Scalla and the dragon. Be prepared for that. I have to go home; I need to go home. I’ll give you whatever I can before I go, but I am going.
It’s OK, or really, it won’t be, but we can’t stop the truth for the sake of comfort, Scalla said.
I quietly wondered if she really knew what she was calling down on her country, but I figured it was up to the Aravisians to decide what to do with Aravisia.
All of it, Greynell reiterated.
I nodded and formulated the idea in my mind. No one could put on the blinkers anymore, no one could pretend this hadn’t happened, divert attention away by pointing out that not all riders harmed dragons, play games of smoke and mirrors by focussing on the paranoid delusions about threats from outside Aravisia. There was nowhere for anyone to escape. I heard the cries and gasps around the amphitheatre, no doubt echoed across the country.
When the wish left me I felt strangely empty. I guess it was a reasonable reaction to have after the day I’d had. Fuck, Miazydar.
“I was wondering when you’d remember him,” Nan said with a smile to soften her words. That’s the problem with magic. It makes you a giant, making sweeping changes and then you forget those you love the most. It’s why
I’d given it all away when I married your grandfather. No harm done, well, not by you. Here’s your beastie.”
My dragon was deposited on the sand next to us, but in a condition I would never have wanted to see him in. Not a scale on his glistening red hide was harmed, but I could see the emotional damage of what he’d been forced to do weighed immensely on him. He was little more than a ball, his limbs tucked in tight, his muzzle resting limply on the ground. He wasn’t asleep but his eyes were closed. He flinched when I rested my hand on him, something that tore at me.
My heart?
No, I can’t be anyone’s heart, not after that.
Miazydar, you are always my heart.
Then your heart rapes the sedated bodies of fellow dragons.
I sighed, settling down next to him. Miazydar...
Don’t try to rationalise this, he said, finally opening his eyes. Those glowing yellow depths bore into mine as he dared me to try.